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In some places the island, on this southern side, is bitten into by sharp, narrow coves, and when the fog opened a little I could see across them, where gulls and choughs were picking about on the grass, looking as big as Kerry cattle or black mountain sheep. Before I reached the house the cloud had turned to a sharp shower of rain, and as I went in the water was dripping from my hat.
To begin with were fascinating cottages with neat little box-edged gardens and straw-thatched roofs; curious evergreen trees with stiff jointed branches known locally as monkey-puzzles; there were pretty children, some of whom waved hands of recognition; there were skylarks singing in the blue above, their happy notes falling like musical rain; there were big black and white magpies and black choughs, rooks and corbies, now known to the young people by their English names.
And that plenty have they by the miracle of God; for the ravens and the crows and the choughs and other fowls of the country assemble them there every year once, and fly thither as in pilgrimage; and everych of them bringeth a branch of the bays or of olive in their beaks instead of offering, and leave them there; of the which the monks make great plenty of oil. And this is a great marvel.
I learnt more Greek and Latin in Bremen than business. I was invalided home, and then tried a merchant's office in London. I put on my hat one day, and walked into the country. My College fellows were hawkers, tinkers, tramps and ploughmen, choughs and crows. A volume of our Poets and a History of Philosophy composed my library.
There was a great silence in their windless shelter broken only by the boom and charge of the breakers and the gulls and choughs circling overhead, winging and dipping along the water and returning with discordant cries to their crannies in the black rock.
Close by it was a wilderness of trees and thicket; here the garden had been, and had stretched out to a great lake, which was now moorland. Crows and choughs flew screaming over the old trees, and there were crowds of birds; they did not seem to get fewer when any one shot among them, but seemed rather to increase.
Tom went more and more to the Choughs, and Patty noticed a change in the youth a change that half-fascinated and half-repelled her. Then, for the next few days, Tom plunged deeper and deeper downwards. He left off pulling on the river, shunned his old friends, and lived with a set of men who were ready enough to let him share all their brutal orgies.
Before the end of that summer term Tom had it made up with Hardy, and it was Hardy who, at Tom's request, called in at the Choughs, just to see how things were going on. Tom saw at a glance that something had happened when Hardy appeared again. "What is it? She is not ill?" he said quickly. "No; quite well, her aunt says." "You didn't see her, then?" "No the fact is, she has gone home."
With these words he approached the cavern, and perceived that it was impossible to let himself down or effect an entrance except by sheer force or cleaving a passage; so drawing his sword he began to demolish and cut away the brambles at the mouth of the cave, at the noise of which a vast multitude of crows and choughs flew out of it so thick and so fast that they knocked Don Quixote down; and if he had been as much of a believer in augury as he was a Catholic Christian he would have taken it as a bad omen and declined to bury himself in such a place.
As I lie there I can watch whole flights of cormorants and choughs and seagulls that fly about under the cliffs, and beyond them a number of niavogues that are nearly always fishing in Ferriter's Cove. Further on there are Sybil Head and three rocky points, the Three Sisters then Smerwick Harbour and Brandon far away, usually covered with white airy clouds.
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